Becoming a better public speaker in 2012
This year I am making an effort to become a better public speaker by participating in a local Toastmasters (specifically, Pacers Toastmasters) group.
When I tell people I joined Toastmasters, they usually know it is a public speaking and leadership club but they don’t know about and are often curious about what goes on at a typical meeting. Here’s a quick summary:
- Prepared speeches: 4 members give prepared and (hopefully) rehearsed speeches that range from 5-10 minutes in length, and one member gives a short inspirational speech that is a minute or two in length.
- Evaluations: Each of the 4 prepared speeches is evaluated by an evaluator. The evaluator gets up in front of the members and spends up to 2 minutes discussing positive aspects of the speech as well as areas for improvement. There is also a General Evaluator who evaluates the evaluators as well as the speakers who delivered the prepared speeches.
- Table Topics: One of the members leads a session of extemporaneous speaking, where he/she invites each member up to the stage to give a 1-2 minute speech on a topic that was only revealed to them as they came up on stage.
- Grammar and Timer Reports: One member is responsible for counting and reporting on all of the “filler words” (umms, ahhs, you knows, etc) used during the speeches and evaluations. Another member is responsible for timing all of the speeches, and at the end of the meeting shares those times with the group. They also give you the hook if your speech runs beyond its allotted time :)
If you have interest in improving your public speaking skills, you owe it to yourself to check out a local Toastmasters chapter meeting. Our club welcomes guests who pre-register, so that they can get a sense of what the club, and Toastmasters in general, is all about. If you think you might be interested in checking out the club, visit our website and follow the directions related to attending meetings as a guest.. We’re a pretty welcoming bunch!
IDEs belong in the cloud
A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to play around with Ruby and naively thought that it would be easy to get started. I’d download Eclipse, and a few Ruby packages that weren’t shipped with MacOS, and then be off to the races. Fat chance. What I thought was going to a leisurely evening of writing sample Ruby apps turned out to be a marathon debugging session, wrestling with dependencies, error messages, and anything else that could have possible gone wrong — before I had the chance to write a lick of my own code. It reminded me of being a sysadmin, poring over log files and reading cryptic StackOverflow posts trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with my setup. It just should not be this hard for someone moderately technical to start coding up a simple app.
Fortunately there are some companies building cloud hosted IDEs (definitely should have started there in retrospect), like eXo, Cloud9 and Kodingen, who will take slot of the “getting started” pain out of your coding experience. Spend less time monkeying around with libraries and dependencies and more time developing cool stuff. I like it.
The other cool thing about cloud hosted IDEs is that it opens up a ton of innovation in terms of 3rd party developers being able to expose their libraries to those IDEs as a web service. Individual users of the IDE could simply select modules and libraries from a service catalog of 3rd party devs, and it would just work, with no hacking or tearing out of ones hair :) I can also see someone making a play to develop some kind of middleware layer where 3rd party Devs could upload their libraries as-is, and that middleware would make the libraries available as a web service to the Cloud IDEs. Maybe github is the right home for that middleware-as-a-service?
I think this is a really interesting space but I’m sure I’m missing some of the nuances. Let me know what I may have overlooked in the comments. I appreciate any and all feedback.
Don’t be a Grin…
Take the harder path. Politely speak your mind. Take a stand. Join the debate. Don’t be a grin fucker. It makes life too boring.
Doing a startup versus reading about doing a startup
As Rob May of Backupify once tweeted, “Everything I learned about doing a startup came from doing a startup… not reading blogs about it.”
via Sarah Tavel / Adventurista: Holding your hand to the fire.
Missing the boat on virtualization management
Therefore it is fair to conclude that to date the”big four” have completely missed the virtualization monitoring and management market. They have not only missed it, they have missed it badly. Not only have they missed it, but they have completely failed to address both the technical changes and business model changes that virtualization and cloud computing demand in the management space.
via CA Starts the Race Among the “Big Four” in Virtualization Management.
“As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead.”
The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft, who was married to a friend of the Jobs family, and who invited Jobs to his fiftieth-birthday party. As Jobs tells Isaacson:
“This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”
A blunt take on vendor ROI models
Rookie CEOs and control freaks will ask for the charade of a hard ROI model, something that really is almost impossible to create with any degree of accuracy. And if these ROI models are so important, why are they never revisited after the technology is implemented? I’ll tell you why. These models were BS in the first place and so much is learned in the implementation that the upfront ROI models are almost always irrelevant. Also, when CEOs want to invest in something on a hunch, they don’t do much of an ROI model. They just call it strategic.
Why VC’s should be startup CEO’s via @sgblank
Today, you can start a web/mobile/cloud startup for $500,000 and have money left over. Every potential early-stage Venture Capitalist should take a year and do it before he or she makes partner.
via Steel In Their Eyes – Why VC’s Should Be Startup CEO’s « Steve Blank.
Amen!
We plan to start investing carefully with about $100M slated for the U.S. My passion and my personality will make an imprint on the work we do. Our focus will be early-stage, Series A software and internet companies that have technology and innovation at their core. B2B, SaaS, cloud, big data, analytics, infrastructure, enterprise — these, in my opinion, are markets underserved by the current swarm of consumer internet investors. And these are exactly the investments that we are going to do.
The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage // ben’s blog
Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.
